Teaching Code Literacy

Programming is a life skill. Kids needs to learn how to code for the same reasons that they need to learn physics, chemistry, and foreign language. They need to understand how their world works. We need to stretch their brains when they are young. But kids don’t care about all that, they want immediate gratification, but they are also motivated to take the tools they see on the web and put them to use for their own amusement and self-expression.

How do we craft a language to meet this goals? or should we? Sarah Allen will share how she made a little language called “Pie” for web and mobile game development. She’ll share positive and negative reactions from her test audiences. You’ll learn a bit about how to create a domain-specific language (DSL) in Ruby, along with more general ideas of what works (and doesn’t) in the creation of a new language.